Drawing on my experience of a Muslim version of exorcism in urban Macedonia, this article continues a methodological discussion of the implications of being an atheist anthropologist when researching religion, a situation known as 'methodological atheism'. Methodological atheism is often linked to the problem of suspending one's intellectual disregard of people's religions as delusions. This article will argue instead that there are barriers to participation in religious rituals that are not covered by questions of disbelief. The notion of 'dispositional atheism' is discussed against the backdrop of the anxieties, uncertainties, and inhibitions experienced by an atheist anthropologist caught up in a moment of religious intensity."If one has no faith, is there any reason why one should be interested?" (Berger 2004: 1). This question springs from two common assumptions-that theology is interesting only for believers, while anthropology is inevitably a non-theistic discipline that consists of secular endeavors of non-believers to "explain [religion] away" (Binsbergen 1991: 336). However, within theology, conceptualized as an established academic field, there are uncertainties as to whether theology is indeed a confessional discipline that attracts only religious people (Bowie 1998). Scholars have been asking if, as an exercise in philosophical thinking, theologies can be understood across the faith-non-faith divide. For example, can an atheist study theology (Cush 2009)? Is a theologian ill-equipped to undertake a non-confessional study of religion (Yong 2012: 18)? These concerns about subjective religiosity or the non-religion of a researcher are analogous to the questions raised in anthropology about its methodological and epistemological foundations as a secular social science (Bielo 2014: 7). So, is anthropology of religion a confessional discipline of a kind? Does an anthropologist have to 'believe' to carry out research among seriously religious people? This article Confessional Anthropology | 115 revisits the debates about how the atheism of anthropology and of anthropologists enables or impedes ethnographic research and the production of anthropological knowledge.